A conveyor oven typically has a first opening through which uncooked food enters and a second opening at the opposite end of the oven through which cooked food exits. A stainless steel conveyor belt is commonly used to carry food items from a loading platform through a heated cavity between the first and second openings and ultimately onto an unloading platform. The conveyor belt extends past both openings sufficiently to allow safe insertion and retrieval of food items from the loading and unloading platforms. This arrangement allows food items to be placed on the conveyor belt on a continuous basis to achieve sequential steady-state cooking. The only limit to how many substantially identical food items may be placed in the conveyor oven is the speed of the conveyor belt, which correlates to the residence time inside the heated cavity for food items to be sufficiently cooked.
When food items offered by a commercial food service operation such as a restaurant are to be cooked at the same temperature for the same amount of time in a relatively large kitchen area, a conveyor oven is particularly advantageous. The operator need only set the temperature, blower speed and conveyor belt speed as necessary to cook the selected foods. Once these three parameters are set, the oven may be operated continuously without any further adjustments. Even a person unskilled in the art of cooking is able to prepare high-quality cooked food products simply by placing them on the loading platform of a conveyor oven. The ease of operation and high throughput make conveyor ovens highly desirable in restaurants and other commercial food service settings that have sufficient space to accommodate them.
However, conveyor ovens also have their disadvantages. For example, most commercial food service operations offer a variety of different food items, such as pizza, chicken, vegetables and pie, which require a wide range of cooking times and heat transfer profiles. Even a single food order at a restaurant may include a variety of food items, and different food items require different cooking times, temperatures and blower speeds. Conveyor ovens are very efficient when cooking similar food items, but not for cooking a variety of food items that require vastly different cooking times and heat transfer profiles. In addition, the two openings contribute to tremendous heat loss during the operation of conveyor ovens. The lost heat must be replaced in order to maintain cook temperature, and as a result conveyer ovens are not energy efficient. Furthermore, the space required by the loading and unloading platforms of conveyor ovens limit the application of conveyor ovens to relatively large commercial kitchens.
Consequently, it would be desirable to provide a reduced footprint oven with the efficiency of conveyor ovens while enabling different cooking times and temperatures, and without the large amount of heat loss associated with conveyor ovens.